152: How a Dying Brand Became an Internet Legend (Old Spice, Part 1)

The brief, the copywriter, and the campaign that nobody at the agency thought would get approved.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS. I’m excited to show you how Old Spice took a fresh angle with creative and made themselves cultural staple. Then you can use their frameworks on your own business. In 2009, Old Spice was a brand your grandfather used.

That's not a metaphor. It's a demographic reality. The brand had been owned by Procter & Gamble since 1990, and while it was profitable, it was quietly aging. Its core customer was getting older. Younger men - the critical 18-34 demographic — associated Old Spice with their fathers and their fathers' medicine cabinets.

P&G gave the brand's agency, Wieden+Kennedy, a brief: reverse the trend.

What came back was a campaign so unexpected that multiple people inside the agency assumed it would never be approved.

It was approved. Then it went further than anyone at the table had imagined.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• How a copywriter rewrote the brief before writing a single line

• Why the campaign's absurdity was actually its most strategic quality

• What "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" reveals about brand permission and creative courage

The brief nobody wanted.

W+Kennedy's assignment was straightforward in the worst way: make Old Spice relevant to young men.

Brands in this situation usually do one of two things. They update the packaging and run lifestyle advertising with younger models. Or they hire an athlete, run a celebrity campaign, and hope borrowed equity transfers.

P&G had a specific problem that made both of those approaches harder: the launch of a new body wash line. Old Spice was trying to expand beyond aftershave — into a category dominated by Axe, which had spent the previous decade building an almost pathologically effective ad campaign around the promise of sexual attraction.

Going up against Axe's appeal-to-insecurity playbook head-to-head would mean competing on their terrain, with their logic, against a decade of established positioning.

Copywriter Jason Bagley and director Tom Kuntz proposed something different.

Don't compete on Axe's terms. Don't try to make Old Spice cool. Make Old Spice funny - but funny in a way that made the target customer feel smart for getting the joke.

And target women.

The insight: women buy men's body wash.

This is one of those creative insights that seems obvious in retrospect and is somehow never acted on.

Research showed that a significant percentage of men's body wash purchases were made by women - partners, mothers, girlfriends — either shopping for the men in their lives or influencing the purchase decision. The actual end user wasn't the one standing in the aisle.

Bagley and the team used this insight to flip the entire ad format. Instead of speaking to men about confidence and attraction, they would speak directly to women. About their men. In the most absurdly confident, hyperbolic way possible.

The pitch: a spokesperson speaks directly into camera, addressing women, making increasingly impossible promises about what Old Spice could do for the man in their life.

Everything in the spot would be delivered with complete, unblinking conviction. The comedy would come from the gap between the absurdity of the claims and the total seriousness of the delivery.

They needed to cast someone who could hold that tone for thirty seconds without breaking.

They found Isaiah Mustafa.

The shoot.

Isaiah Mustafa was a former NFL practice squad wide receiver who had been working as an actor without much traction.

His audition for Old Spice lasted less than a minute.

The spot they were producing was technically demanding: thirty seconds, almost entirely one continuous take, with several scene changes accomplished through camera tricks and set manipulation.

Mustafa would be on a boat. Then a horse. Then delivering oysters. The whole sequence was designed to be physically disorienting - the joke was that the transitions made no sense, and Mustafa's complete composure in the face of the nonsense was the punchline.

He nailed it in a handful of takes.

The finished spot opened with Mustafa looking directly into the camera: "Hello, ladies."

Thirty seconds later, on a horse, he ended it: "I'm on a horse."

In between, he made promises about tickets to the thing you love, diamonds, and a man who smelled like adventure.

It was the most confident ad for a men's body wash anyone had ever seen. It was also completely, deliberately insane.

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The approval.

The spot was presented to P&G. There was internal debate. An ad this strange, for a brand with this much history, carried real risk.

It was approved.

"The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" launched in February 2010 during the Super Bowl pre-show — not during the game itself, where a 30-second slot would have cost millions. P&G bought cheaper pre-game inventory and then seeded the video online simultaneously.

In the first 24 hours, the video got 6 million views.

In the first week, it had 23 million.

Old Spice body wash sales increased 107% in the month following the launch. By the end of the year, Old Spice had become the #1 selling men's body wash brand in the United States — a position it had never held.

And the campaign was just getting started.

Next week: the 48-hour social media experiment that nobody planned, how 186 personalized videos were filmed in two days, and what W+Kennedy did that every agency still talks about.

Keep Creating,

Chase

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